In a 7-2 decision, the Supremes struck down the California law restricting “violent” video game sales to minors as unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment. Scalia (!) wrote the decision, with Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan in agreement. Alito wrote a separate, concurring opinion, with Alito in agreement. Thomas & Breyer dissented.
Decision here.
Preserving the typo for amusement value.
This law was obviously unconstitutional, and had been ruled that way by the lower courts time and again.
Stupid waste of tax payer money.
Oops. That should have been “Roberts in agreement.”
Reading the decision. The majority holds that videogames are entitled to full First Amendment protection, full stop. They don’t believe that the studies that link violent videogames to actual violence have any validity:
Alito says that there aren’t First Amendment issues here, but just that the CA law was overly broad in its descriptions of violent videogames.
And Thomas thinks videogames are tools of Satan.
I’m taking considerable satisfaction in reading Scalia’s opinion. Whatever my opinion on his other stances, there’s no question that he can write. I liked the way he stepped through the series of media scapegoats, starting with dime novels and working his way through every new medium up to the present. I think that, more than anything else, shows real understanding of what’s going on with this law and the others like it.
Some of the best bits are in the footnotes, though. I particularly enjoyed footnote 3, wherein Scalia seems to stop just shy of calling Thomas a blithering idiot. Footnote 7 is another prize:
Alito, on the other hand, strikes me as rather technophobic and lacking in appreciation for scientific rigor. I’m glad he came to the right decision, but worried that he did so for the wrong reasons.
I gather that Yee is already blubbering that the Court is putting corporate interests ahead of “TEH CHILDREN”.
It’s interesting that you would say that, because that is a standard criticism of the Roberts court, but now, since they came to the “correct” decision, it won’t be leveled at them in spite of the fact that it’s just as applicable now as it ever was.
Anyway, it was definitely the right decision, but as per every major decision we have to accept that even the right decision comes with potential consequences.
So if I’m understanding this correctly (I haven’t read the entire opinion and dissent), Breyer’s contention was that the ban on violent video games was consistent with the ban on selling, say, pornography to minors. The majority’s opinion was that there was no precedent for restructing minors from accessing violent material, and therefore the ban should be lifted.
This just further confuses me on how they come up with rules on what is acceptable for children to see. It seems like sides have been chosen, no matter how arbitrarily, and we’re sticking with them. Period.
And it’s often been a fair criticism. In this case, though, Yee is making a cynical attempt to use that pattern to cover his failure. I think it significant that Thomas–whose only complaint about the Citizens United ruling was that it didn’t protect corporations enough, as best I can tell–dissented.
Just more proof that there are utter schmucks on both sides of the aisle.
The California law was deliberately written to mimic laws restricting porn, to the extent that they directly copied language from at least one of them. Yee was trying to redefine “obscenity” to include video game violence so that he could get around the obvious First Amendment issues. Breyer appears to have cheerfully swallowed this camel.
The problem with that is that the Court has defined “obscene” material in this context as sexual material that meets an assortment of criteria. This standard was established in Ginsberg v. New York in 1968. (Footnote 2 goes into more detail on that case.) Violence, unless that violence has an explicit sexual component, doesn’t fall into the category the courts have established as “obscenity”, which is why Scalia said that the law was trying to create a new category of unprotected speech.
I find that to be endlessly circular. “The Supreme Court does not find violence to be obscene because the Supreme Court has found that obscenity does not include violence.” It seems that they’ve replaced evaluating the merits of what is obscene or acceptable for minors to view with “We made up our minds in a previous case; violence is not obscenity.”
In case it matters, I do find the “Won’t someone think of the childrenz” bit to be obnoxious, and am glad that minors can purchase violent video games, but I honestly fail to see the logic. Then again, this is coming from the same person who has never seen the logic, and has always wondered why it’s okay to show someone’s armed get hacked off in a PG-13 movie, but the moment a penis is on screen, or a man dare kiss a woman’s breast, it is forbidden from the view of the precious babies.
Anyway, good for the Supreme Court. I guess.
I believe the logic behind the double-standard is that people want to kiss breasts but don’t want to hack arms off. Showing the former would encourage a behavior you (if you’re a puritan) want to discourage, while showing the latter doesn’t matter because nobody wants to hack arms off anyway.
In Scalia’s opinion, he specifically mentions Grimm’s fairy tales. For good or ill, Western society has always embraced presenting children with violent imagery (Hansel and Gretel cooked an old woman alive, red riding hood is saved by the woodsman cutting up the wolf with an axe, etc.) but Western society has not embraced presenting children with sexually explicit material. You can lament on the why this is so if you want, but the fact that it IS so is undeniable, and forms the basis of Scalia’s opinion. He recognizes that our culture does not treat sexual material and violent material the same, and that laws should reflect that, else we end up banning the broadcast of old Looney Tunes cartoons on obscenity grounds because Elmer Fudd shot Daffy Duck in the face with a shotgun.
Look - Can’t you see that my agenda here is to get hard core pornography in the hands of small children? More seriously, I’m glad we can now exist without this nonsense ban, but I wish we would also lighten up a little bit about letting kids see a tit on screen. I could live without showing “Rachel’s First Gangbang” to eight year olds, but it seems like if there’s a minute-long sex scene in a film, it’s slapped with an automatic R rating. Relax, ladies, Timmy will survive if he sees thirty seconds of boob in “Love, Actually” which, by the way, is probably the only romantic comedy I’ve ever seen that I didn’t hate.